[5] In addition to public outreach, The Planetary Society has sponsored solar sail and microorganisms-in-space projects to foster space exploration.

In June 2005, the Society launched the Cosmos 1 craft to test the feasibility of solar sailing, but the rocket failed shortly after liftoff.

[12] Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE), was a two-part program designed to test the ability of microorganisms to survive in space.

[14] The second phase rode on Russia's Fobos-Grunt mission, which attempted to go to Mars' moon Phobos and back but failed to escape Earth orbit.

[15] The Planetary Society was founded in 1980 by Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and Louis Friedman as a champion of public support of space exploration and the search for extraterrestrial life.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Society pushed its scientific and technologic agenda, which led to an increased interest in rover-based planetary exploration and NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto.

The show's programming consists mostly of interviews and telephone-based conversations with scientists, engineers, project managers, artists, writers, astronauts, and many other professionals who can provide some insight or perspective into the current state of space exploration.